MySQL Security Best Practices: A Practical Guide for Locking Down Your Database Introduction

MySQL runs just about everywhere. I’ve seen it behind small personal projects, internal tools, SaaS platforms, and large enterprise systems handling serious transaction volume. When your database sits at the center of everything, it becomes part of your security perimeter whether you planned it that way or not. And that makes it a target.

Securing MySQL isn’t about flipping one magical setting and calling it done. It’s about layers. Tight access control. Encrypted connections. Clear visibility into what’s happening on the server. And operational discipline that doesn’t drift over time.

In this guide, I’m going to walk through practical MySQL security best practices that you can apply right away. These are the kinds of checks and hardening steps that reduce real risk in real environments, and help build a database …

This blog will address how the MariaDB Auditing Plugin can help monitor database activity to help with security, accountability and troubleshooting.

Why Audit Your Databases?

Auditing is an essential task for monitoring your database environment. By auditing your database, you can achieve accountability for actions taken or content accessed within your environment. You will also deter users (or others) from inappropriate actions.

If there is any bad behavior, you can investigate suspicious activity. For example, if a user is deleting data from tables, the admins could audit all connections to the database and all deletions of rows. You can also use auditing to notify admins when an unauthorized user manipulates or deletes data or that a user has more privileges than expected.

Auditing Plugins Available for MySQL

As Sergei Glushchenko said in a …

This post shows the construction process of the Syslog Audit plugin that was presented at MySQL Connect 2012. It is based on an environment that has the appropriate development tools enabled including gcc,g++ and cmake. It also assumes you have downloaded the MySQL source code (5.5.16 or higher) and have compiled and installed the system into the /usr/local/mysql directory ready for use. 

The information provided below is designed to show the different components that make up a plugin, and specifically an audit type plugin, and how it comes together to be used within the MySQL service. The MySQL Reference Manual contains information regarding the plugin API and how it can be used, so please refer there for more detailed information. The code in this post is designed to …

For those with an interest in MySQL, this weekend's MySQL Connect conference in San Francisco has gotten off to a great start. On Saturday Tomas announced the feature complete MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate that is now available for Community adoption and testing. This announcement marks the sprint to GA that should be ready for release within the next 90 days. You can get a quick summary of the key 5.6 features here or better yet download the 5.6 RC (under “Development Releases”), review what's new and try it out for yourself! There were also product related announcements around …

At the end of September, the MySQL Connect 2012 conference will be held as part of Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. MySQL Connect is a two day event that allows attendees to focus on MySQL at a technical depth with presentations and interaction with many of the MySQL developers, engineers and other knowledgeable staff. There is also a range a international speakers to give broader knowledge to the presentations.

I am presenting a Hands-On Lab on Sunday 30th September 16:15 - 17:15 entitled HOL10474 - MySQL Security: Authentication and Auditing. The sessions goes through an introduction to the plugin API and how it can help expand the capabilities of MySQL. Since it is a hands-on lab, …

I feel a sense of pride when I think that I was involved in the development and maintenance of what was probably the first piece of software accepted into Debian which then had and still has direct up-stream support from Microsoft. The world is a better place for having Microsoft in it. The first operating system I ever ran on an 08086-based CPU was MS-DOS 2.x. I remember how thrilled I was when we got to see how my friend’s 80286 system ran BBS software that would cause a modem to dial a local system and display the application as if it were running on a local machine. Totally sweet.

When we were living at 6162 NE Middle in the nine-eight 292, we got an 80386 which ran Doom. Yeah, the original one, not the fancy new one with the double barrel shotgun, but it would probably run that one, too. It was also …

The brief outage was due to a scheduled move of the servers to a separate rack and subnet dedicated to our work with the Center for Information Assurance & Cybersecurity (ciac) at the University of Washington Bothell (uwb), and a11y.com

I am currently exercising the new (to us) equipment and hope to winnow the less than awesome equipment over the next quarter. I spent the last six months finding the best in breed of the surplussed DL385 and DL380 chassis we (work) were going to have recycled. The team and I were able to find enough equipment to bring up one of each with eight and six gigs of memory, respectively. These will make excellent hypervisors for provisioning embedded instances of Slackware, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, FreeDOS, etc.

When I initially configured this xen paravirt environment, I failed to plan for integration with libvirt, so I am now re-jiggering the software bridges so …

It’s been released. Use this with NIST::NVD 1.00.00 and you will be able to perform immediate look-ups of CVE and CWE data given a CPE URN. For instance:

cjac@foxtrot:/usr/src/git/f5/NIST-NVD-Store-SQLite3$ perl Makefile.PL ; make ; make test ; cjac@foxtrot:/usr/src/git/f5/NIST-NVD-Store-SQLite3$ perl -MNIST::NVD::Query -MData::Dumper -e '
$q = NIST::NVD::Query->new(store    => q{SQLite3},database => q{t/data/nvdcve-2.0.db});
$cve_list = $q->cve_for_cpe( cpe => q{cpe:/a:microsoft:ie:7.0.5730.11} );
print Data::Dumper::Dumper { cve_list => $cve_list, first_cvss => $q->cve( cve_id => $cve_list->[0] )->{q{vuln:cvss}} }
'
$VAR1 = {
          'cve_list' => [
                          'CVE-2002-2435',
                          'CVE-2010-5071'
                        ],
          'first_cvss' => {
                            'cvss:base_metrics' => { …

I’m leaving myself some room for bug fixes. It works for us in house. I would love to help others to give it a try. especially those who could benefit from making nearly immediately answered queries to the NIST’s NVD database.

The code in this release cannot by itself track the feed from the feds in real time. The nvd entry loader needs a little bit of love in the area of record merging before this starts working. It’s on my TODO list.

I’m sorry for the outage of git.colliertech.org. I’ll get that back up here shortly. In the meantime, feel free to grab it from this location while the CPAN indexes and processes my submission.

http://www.colliertech.org/federal/NIST/NIST-NVD-1.00.00.tar.bz2

don’t forget to check the cryptographic signature:

…

The GreenSQL Unified Database Security solution is proceeding at a rapid pace. We are pleased to announce that our latest release, GreenSQL 2.1.4, is available for immediate download.

The GreenSQL Unified Solution features Security, Auditing, Masking and Performance for databases  in one suite, ensuring that databases are protected from internal and external threats in real-time, while improving performance and facilitating database security policy compliance.

Download any GreenSQL package and get GreenSQL’s Enterprise Edition functionality for an evaluation period of 14 days. 

Read more:  …